Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.

Where Sony and Microsoft follow the iOS model for consoles, Valve is aiming for the Android model, including Valve's own line of 'Nexus' devices. As Valves notes, no restrictions - you can change the hardware, software, and install any operating system you want. The right approach, obviously.

Engineers from Valve and NVIDIA have spent a lot of time collaborating on a common goal for SteamOS: to deliver an open-platform gaming experience with superior performance and uncompromising visuals directly on the big screen.

NVIDIA engineers embedded at Valve collaborated on improving driver performance for OpenGL; optimizing performance on NVIDIA GPUs; and helping to port Valve's award-winning content library to SteamOS; and tuning SteamOS to lower latency, or lag, between the controller and onscreen action.

This is going to be big. After being defeated in mobile, it seems Microsoft is facing another frontal assault on another one of its strongholds: gaming, whether it be Windows or Xbox.

You think the popularity of media devices, an htpc in this case, is dropping? Wrong. The demand for small, quiet, low power htpcs is higher than ever and why you're seeing more & more htpc features integrated into tvs, etc.

However, while the idea of having a full htpc/gaming system in one looks good on paper, it's a product consumers simply haven't asked for and don't seem to want. That's what these companies don't get. If they wanted an all-in-one system, they would already be using one because the capability has been there for quite some time. Media consumers and gamers are in fact two different & distinct groups. Yes, there is some overlap, but these companies seem like they view them as a single massive group. They're trying to bridge a gap that isn't there for most people. You're not going to sell millions of devices when people just aren't that interested.